{"id":4363,"date":"2026-04-15T12:56:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T17:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/?p=4363"},"modified":"2026-04-15T12:56:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T17:56:07","slug":"a-long-and-speaking-silence-by-nghi-vo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/?p=4363","title":{"rendered":"A Long and Speaking Silence, by Nghi Vo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Review copy provided by the publisher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Welllll, I bet Vo wishes <em>this<\/em> was less topical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Given the time it takes to put a book through production, she was clearly thinking about refugees and their treatment with the cohort of us who knew that it was a crucial world political issue before the early months of 2026. But now here we are, and hey, look! A protagonist who is sensitive to and helping refugees without requiring them to be moral paragons! Everybody buy two copies and pass them around, its time has come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I am not being sarcastic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is the latest in the Singing Hills Cycle, which is the chronicles of Cleric Chih and their memory hoopoe, Almost Brilliant. It is a perfectly good entry point to the series&#8211;you will smoothly and swiftly find out who these people are, what they&#8217;re up to, and why you should care, and then you can circle back and read the others as you can find them. (They&#8217;re still in print, but we live in parlous times etc.) And while the plight of refugees is not exactly an <em>upbeat<\/em> topic, the different volumes have different levels of harrowing, and this is definitely on the less-harrowing end, which often makes for a good starting point. (Again parlous times.) I&#8217;m glad this series is ongoing, and I&#8217;m glad this is the way it&#8217;s going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Review copy provided by the publisher. Welllll, I bet Vo wishes this was less topical. Given the time it takes to put a book through production, she was clearly thinking about refugees and their treatment with the cohort of us who knew that it was a crucial world political issue before the early months of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4364,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363\/revisions\/4364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}